If you link to someone and they ask you to remove their link, then it is polite to do so. It is good manners.

Should you ask permission to link to someone on your blogroll or otherwise? Maybe. It depends upon what you are going to do with that link. Blogroll links are recommendations, encouraging visitors to follow the sites you recommend. If they don’t want your recommendation, you probably don’t want them on your list.

However, if you are using a link to their blog or website in a way that makes you money, takes money away from them, or exploits their site for your own benefit, then I recommend you get permission as the perspective on the outgoing link has changed.

As I’ve said before, if you want to link to this blog, please don’t ask me. I get requests constantly and I can’t keep up with them all. Go ahead. Link away. Abuse me and you’ll hear from me, but for general blogrolls and linking, you have my permission.

11 Comments

I really do not get that linking permission business. Is the century-old publishing etiquette not good enough for bloggers? Nobody ever ever asks for permission when they list a hundred other publications in a technical article. Nobody ever asks for permission when they cite other books in the bibliography or in the text, even when it is to fuel controversy or outrage. What if I am citing dead authors (Shakespeare or Voltaire or Cicero)? I cannot get permission from them can I? Does this mean I can or I can’t cite them? (I am quite sure Voltaire would want nothing to do with me and my pathetic amateur writer / philosopher skills.)

Asking someone for a link is a politeness, I think, but an unneeded one. The more people who link to me, the better!

However, there is a very important caveat. I put together a list of the Top Ten Space Images of 2006, and chose an image of Saturn as #1.

Well, my article got on Slashdot and Digg, so I got hundreds of thousands of hits. So many people clicked on the Saturn link that the NASA server got bogged down!

So if you link to someone in an article, it might be nice to warn them if the article may get slammed. In practice, I’m not sure how to do that, since you can never be sure when it will happen, or which link it will be (though in my case the top image link was the obvious one).

What you did is called “hotlinking” and is considered, how shall I put this, WRONG. Most NASA images are available for use, but I’m sure they would prefer you host the image rather than linking to it, thus making you pay for the bandwidth not them. I’m sure they appreciated the boost in traffic in general, but hotlinking is very bad practice, and a different issue.

If you choose to hotlink, you are required to ask permission, as that is content. Linking to web pages, however, does not require permission.

May I link to you. Just joking.
“What you do need permission for is to copy content from someone else that exceeds fair use.” You’d be surprised the number of people who think as long as they cite their source, they can copy it.

[…] to do my own research. I discovered that, while linking to online content does not have a clear legal status, it is unlikely that linking would be understood as copyright infringement in court. The […]